


we were all basically alone

by Amber



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Character Study, Disturbing, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Insanity, Mad Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-04-22
Updated: 2009-04-22
Packaged: 2017-10-04 08:34:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amber/pseuds/Amber
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three glimpses into the mind of Dr. Franken Stein: teacher, child, man. | Stein shaves without a mirror, leaning in the doorframe of his laboratory and watching the light fracture in the jumble of glass vial on his shelves. He uses a scalpel so sharp he can hear the edge of it, but his steady grip never slips. Precision is important: shaky hands make for messy surgery, after all, and besides — it's no fun to cut yourself <i>accidentally</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we were all basically alone

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Erin-senpai. Title from Andrew Bird's "iMitosis".

**i.**  
Stein shaves without a mirror, leaning in the doorframe of his laboratory and watching the light fracture in the jumble of glass vial on his shelves. He uses a scalpel so sharp he can hear the edge of it, but his steady grip never slips. Precision is important: shaky hands make for messy surgery, after all, and besides — it's no fun to cut yourself _accidentally_.

Sometimes, when he finishes, he presses the blade against his jugular, not hard enough to break the skin, but an ungentle reminder that he could. If he wanted to. But it's better to not. His hand drops.

Afterwards, he smokes a cigarette and skims his outline for today's class. He likes the way the students look doing a practical dissection; he especially likes the way Spirit's daughter squirms almost imperceptibly in her seat, her soul shuddering.

He's proud of her. Perhaps not with the same amount of enthusiasm as his senpai, but it's nice, he thinks, to feel proud of one of his students like that. It makes not being allowed to peel off her skin inch by torturous inch seem less of a loss.

  
**ii.**  
Stein is trying to build a sandcastle from the beach with dry sand. The air is thick with the gleeful screeches of playing children as his classmates splash through the waves. It sounds like they're dying. Every turret and tower he tries to build sinks back into itself until he just has a mountain. A lump.

"Oi, you idiot. Come a little closer to the water if you're going to do something like that."

Stein wonders idly how blood would mix with sand. When it dried, would it be sticky and tacky, or hard? What colour would it be?

"Hey, Stein. Hey! What are you even building?"

He's already recognized the voice as Spirit's, but his green gaze slides around anyway. His senpai is in swimming trunks; his hair slick and dark and sticking up strangely at the back. Stein watches in fascination as a rivulet of water creeps from Spirit's hair, all the way down his arm, to drip from the curve of his wrist. It falls, perfectly globular, and creates a tiny indentation where it falls: a dark spot on the sun-bright sand.

"Shibusen," he says, matter-of-factly.

Spirit let's out a little huff as he looks at the mountain-lump. "Why don't you use the wet sand?"

"That's a stupid question." Stein, in sharp comparison to the rest of the children, is fully-dressed. "Because it's wet."

"Ch'" Spirit rolls his eyes and turns on his heel, striding off back to the water. Stein doesn't bother to watch him: his attention flickers back once more to the warm sand trickling between his fingertips, falling from his piles back into shapelessness. He feels listless with heat, and the entire exercise is beginning to feel pointless. The ocean sparkles mockingly in his peripheral vision. Stein wonders how many gallons of water human lungs could hold, sealed and detached from the body.

His revelry is interrupted by a thump. Spirit drops onto the sand next to him and tips water from an unlikely pink bucket. "Now it'll hold together better, right?"

Stein stares blankly at him for a moment, and then reaches to start building again.

Spirit tries to help; at first he's clumsy, but then Stein shows him how to build from the base, how to clump the sand together tightly: "Here, like this." Otherwise, they don't talk, both of them concentrating completely as Shibusen takes life under their hands. Each handful is made up of thousands of grains of sand, Stein knows. Before, they were just shifting separate pieces, impossible to hold together. Now they're coalescing into something beautiful. Stein creates impossible spires and Spirit builds tall towers. Their school in miniature.

A couple of other children have emerged from the water, and they gather nearby, toweling themselves off and chatting inanely. One girl comes and peers down at their creation, her shadow falling over Stein's face. They both stare up at her, until her dark lashes skim a blush on her pale cheeks.

"That's really cool, Spirit," she says, smiling. "It's Shibusen, right?"

"Ah, well." Spirit's shoulders push back, and his lids lower, giving her a half-smile Stein is beginning to recognize. "It's was his idea, I'm just helping. You can try too, if you'd like. I'll show you how."

Stein stares at her neck, where he can see her pulse fluttering very gently. She has a Band-Aid on one bony knee, come a little loose in the water, but not enough that he can see more than the edges of a scrape. Her skin is freckled more on one shoulder than the other. Stein wonders what her heart looks like, visualizes it within her chest, pumping blood in and out, in and out, constantly. He wishes he'd brought his scalpels, but they'd rust in the salt air.

She won't meet his eyes. "No thanks. I'm gonna get an icecream instead, wanna come?"

Spirit jumps to his feet. "Okay!" — and then pauses, looking down at Stein's unmoving form. "Hey, Stein, are you coming?"

"You know," says Stein. "When this dries out, it's all just gonna fall apart." With deliberate malice, he chops his hand into a tower and it crumbles.

"Geez, don't be so weird already." But there's fondness mingled with Spirit's exasperation. Stein watches them go running off together and stands, brushing sand off his trousers. The other kids have dispersed back to their games. Then he lifts a foot and stamps down on their Shibusen. He wonders what a skull caving in would feel like, if it would be different with a bird or a baby. This just feels like sand, and the imprecision burns through him. His lips quirk into something that could have been a smile, if there were more than abstract emotion behind it.

When it's time to go back to the bus, Stein finds Spirit holding an icecream cone; which is immediately thrust into his hands. "Ah, senpai…"

"Hurry up and eat it," says Spirit, gently knocking Stein's shoulder.

It runs down over his fingers in sticky rivulets, and there's sand in it that crunches between his molars and the cold seems to seep into his brain instead of his stomach and Stein eats it down to the tip.

"Thankyou," he says, because he is a well-mannered student, but Spirit just waves his hand. Stein thinks of internal organs and freckles and sunshine and blood and he grins.

  
**iii.**  
Occasionally, when Stein is sprawled along the length of his stitched-together couch, reading, Marie sits at one end and puts his head in her lap, stroking his hair. It makes Stein feel peaceful, an emotion he is uncomfortably unfamiliar with, especially these days. The feel of her slender fingers carding over his scalp makes the churning in his gut and unplaceable itch in the tips of his fingers fade into the background for a while.

"What are you reading?" she asks.

Stein isn't sure. Reading is just an activity to keep his mind busy. He reads the same page three times, the same sentence over and over, focusing on the shape of the kanji until the feel of Medusa's blood on his skin goes away. But he can't tell Marie that.

He checks the cover, and then glances up at her — an awkward angle. "It's a treatise on liver disease."

"You have a lot of medical texts," chirps Marie brightly. "I'm sure it's interesting." She tilts her head to meet his gaze, propping her head on her free hand and smiling down at him. There's worry in her one eye. Stein feels caught by it, unsure whether to just go back to his book or to try and talk to her.

He settles for: "Not really."

"Hm~ how are you feeling today? Have you eaten?"

Stein blinks. Has he eaten? The gaps are getting longer, the fragments of reality harder to piece together in any particular order. His sanity slips through his fingers like dry sand. How can he know what day it is when he keeps forgetting his own name?

Sometimes he truly believes Medusa is still alive, and he has to work out her purpose before she kills them all. Sometimes he spends what seems like forever reliving his school days, a constant prodding. Sometimes he is certain he is covered in blood, that Spirit's blood is smeared warm and copper-sticky over his skin, that Marie's blood has seeped through his clothes and stained them forever.

It's wrong. He's lucid enough right now to recognize that: the madness is the wrong kind, unfamiliar and cruel, cackling and putrid with the stink of kishin. It makes him frantic, and feverish, and emotional. There's no cool reason, no long silences of contemplation, he's just afraid all the time.

And it's not his own nightmares he's afraid of. Not the things that skitter in his peripheral vision or the horrific and gory hallucinations where Medusa cups her full and naked breasts and tears herself in two. The fear, the terror that Asura encapsulates and inspires, is the fear of losing himself entirely to this. Fear of going crazy is making him crazy.

Stein chuckles aloud at the absurdity and realizes abruptly that he hasn't answered Marie's question. Who knows how long the silence has gone on for. "I don't know," he says honestly.

Marie sighs, but her hand doesn't still. "Oh, Franken," she murmurs, and then louder: "I'll make you something later, okay?"

"Hrm," agrees Stein. He tries to go back to his book, but he's too relaxed: it's a battle just to keep his eyes open. He focuses instead on the stitches in the ceiling and the feel of Marie's soul wavelength brushing against his, as soothing as her hand in his hair. In the corner of his mind, something snarls like a caged animal, but he knows the wet need to tear her limb from limb is fake. Marie has never been someone he's wanted to experiment on.

He remembers a long time ago, wrapping bandages around her head:

"It hurts so much when I cry," she'd said, all steel and misery. "So you'd think I'd be able to make myself _stop_."

The sight of her blood then had made him feel an unusual guilt, in the same way that her eyepatch always does. It's an emotion he treasures, if only because he thinks being sorry for terrible things might stop them from making him into a terrible person. So Marie makes him feel guilty, and soothed, and another indefinable warmth, but not… voracious. Not like this.

Stein bites down on his tongue until he can taste his own blood, flicks back the pages, and starts the book again.


End file.
